Contrast detection thresholds are known to increase with background contrast, a phenomenon called contrast masking. We found that, under some conditions, observers improved their masked detection performance by repetitive practice of a masking experiment. This learning effect resulted in a cancellation of suprathreshold contrast masking within the contrast range measured. A two-alternative forc...

Previous work has demonstrated that infants' thresholds for a pure tone are elevated by a masker more than would be predicted from their critical bandwidths. The present studies explored the nature of this additional masking. In Experiment 1, detection thresholds of 6-month-old infants and of adults for a 1-kHz tone were estimated under three conditions: in quiet, in the presence of a 4- to 10-...

Understanding how genetic variation leads to phenotypic variation is a fundamental goal in genetics. One of the challenges of this goal is to distinguish variation in a genome that has an effect on phenotype from variation that has no effect. One way to determine if a genetic variant is likely to have a phenotypic effect is to determine if that variant affects gene regulation. Presumably throug...

This paper presents a characterisation of and definitions for the phenomenon of masking in the context of justifications for entailments in ontologies. In essence masking is present within a justification, over a set of justifications, or over a complete ontology when the number of justifications for an entailment does not reflect the number of reasons for that entailment. Four types of masking...

Image quality models usually include a mechanism whereby artifacts are masked by the image acting as a background. Scientific study of visual masking has followed two traditions: contrast masking and noise masking, depending primarily on whether the mask is deterministic or random. In the former tradition, masking is explained by a decrease in the effective gain of the early visual system. In t...